284
JASON EPSTEIN
the poet finally stands with his back to the void. This is no place to
resume the old question of Auden's famous withdrawal from his early
,::ommitment to the public world except to note the extent to which
he has withdrawn and the way in which, on the evidence of
this
book, his withdrawal has now become his main preoccupation.
At one point Auden talks about Tolstoi's willingness to persuade
himself that utility alone was sufficient to produce art and to allow
him·
self on these grounds to praise works which aesthetically he must
have despised. "The notion of
art engage
and art as propaganda are
extensions of this heresy, and when poets fall into it, the cause, I fear,
is less their social conscience than their vanity; they are nostalgic for a
past when poets had a public status. The opposite heresy is to endow
the gratuitous with a magic utility of its own, so that the poet comes to
think of himself as a god who creates his subjective universl! out of
nothing-to him the visible material universe is nothing. Mallarme
who planned to write the sacred book of a new universal religion,
and
Rilke with his notion of
Gesang
ist
Dasein,
are heresiarchs of this
type.
Both were geniuses, but admire them as one may and must, one's final
impression of their work is of something false and unreal."
Yet if Auden has to choose between the ethical heresy of Tolstoi
and the aesthetic one of Rilke, he will elect the latter, though only as
a matter of emphasis, not of exclusion. In the essay on Frost, Auden
distinguishes between those poets on the side of Ariel for whom truth
is beauty and those who agree with Prospero that "The only end of
writing," in Dr. Johnson's words, "is to enable the readers better to
enjoy life or better to endure it." Genuine poetry is in tension between
the two, seeking answers which shall be valid in circumstances which
are necessarily limited in time and place. The achievement of
poetry
for Auden is to discover in one's experience those sacred objects whose
names are proper nouns, elevated from our common experience,
and
by means of which the poet "praises all he can for being and happen–
ing." Alone, Ariel is purely subjective. Like Narcissus, who is more or
less the villain of
The Dyer's Hand,
he denies the world out there.
He
lacks passion, denies evil. (Prospero without Ariel is, of course, worse.
He is a bad poet.)
It would be unfortunate to leave the impression that
The Dyer's
Hand
in its preoccupation with epistemology is an abstract or didactic
book.
If
anything, the book is a record of Auden's struggle with these
tendencies in himself. But it is nevertheless a demanding and painful
book in much the way that poems themselves used to be. For
it
in·
sists, in a voice that cannot possibly be denied, that for as long as we
